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Guppy Ecology, Sexual Selection and Sensory Bias
Guppies choose mixtures of simple perceptual opposites such as bright and dark colors when they mate.
Topics
∘ Ecology
∘ Feeding
∘ Predators
∘ Habitat Interactions
∘ Social Behavior
∘ Sex
∘ Sexual Selection
∘ Male Competition
∘ Direct Benefits
∘ Good Genes
∘ Sensory Bias
∘ Works Cited
Ecology
The Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata Peters, 1859) is a ray-finned fish in the cyprinodont family poeciliidae, Greek for “with different colors” (Froese and Pauly 2008). It’s also known as the “millions fish” or the “rainbow fish.” Males grow to a maximum size of about 3.5 cm, females to about 5 cm standard length. Guppies have no dorsal spines, seven to eight dorsal soft rays, no anal spines, and eight to ten anal soft rays (Rodriguez 1997, Froese and Pauly 2008). In the poeciliid family there are 293 extant species living in freshwater and brackish habitats at low altitudes in the tropics from the eastern United States to northeastern Argentina, as well as in Africa and Madagascar (Froese and Pauly 2008, Rodriguez 1997). Guppies come from Venezuela, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, northern Brazil and the Guyanas, (Rodriguez 1997, Froese and Pauly 2008, Andersson 1994, Houde 1997) but have been introduced widely for mosquito control.
They tend to live among vegetation in the slow-flowing water of forested freshwater springs, ponds, canals and ditches. Their distribution throughout many small streams results in populations with various evolutionary degrees of independence (Houde 1997). Some populations are estimated to have diverged as much as 600,000 years ago (Houde 1997). Gene flow distance per generation was estimated to be about 0.75 km (Endler 1977). Populations within streams are made up of loosely connected sub-populations, with gene flow sometimes cut off by barriers such as waterfalls (Houde 1997). Guppies are sometimes found in distinct populations above and below large…
